Professor Werner Dutz (1928 - 1984).

rofessor Werner Felix Dutz (Figure 1), an Austrian pathologist, joined the faculty of the School of Medicine of Shiraz University in southern Iran in 1959. He and his wife, Dr. Elfriede Kohout, also a pathologist, had come to Iran for only a two-year appointment at an academic institution in a Third World Country, to meet the existing requirements for eligibility of immigrant status in the U.S. They stayed for fifteen years until 1974, when they left for America and subsequently joined the University of Vienna, Professor Dutz’s alma mater. Werner died unexpectedly of a heart attack in Vienna in 1984. After World War II, many scientists, medical or nonmedical, from Europe or America, ventured across the globe to transfer their skill and knowledge abroad, in return for the satisfaction of having served where they were needed. Upon returning home, they would usually close that chapter of their life by publishing fascinating accounts of their sojourn overseas. Werner Dutz's undertaking was an altogether different proposition. He belonged to a very rare and special class of scientist – travelers. In the early 1960s the city of Shiraz had a population of less than half a million. And the University of Shiraz happened to be in the grips of a tense local political turmoil. It was the ancient and universal confrontation between an established system run by the old guard not willing to abandon its privileges, and a younger generation intent on displacing them. It took almost a decade before the local administrative and political drama in Shiraz was played out by contending forces. Remarkably, in the end a vigorous and high-quality educational institution had evolved. There can be no question that Werner Dutz played a pivotal role in this often painful, but nevertheless successful transformation. His success rested in three special attributes of his: a) He was a ranking medical scientist. Not only did he create single-handedly a superb department of pathology where none existed before, but by the time he left he had also performed over 4000 welldocumented autopsies. This was a remarkable feat, considering that postmortem examinations were almost unthinkable in the socio-cultural settings of History of Contemporary Medicine in Iran